Don’t let the chickenheads get you down

And from Fractured Memories, a nice post about something we’ve all experienced:

Have you ever noticed that some people cannot get far enough out of the problem they’re in to see the cause and correct it. What I mean is along the lines that say everytime you went out ot your car it had no petrol in it, and when you put petrol in it, it ran out almost immediately. You’d want to know why, right? You’d take it in to the garage and say, fix the damn thing. You’d find the root cause of the problem (say a punctured fuel tank) and have it patched up or replaced. What you wouldn’t do (if you had any common sense at all is buy a big can to carry round spare fuel. And carry round a second big can full of fuel in case the first one ran out. And buy spare cans to keep full of fuel at your favourite visiting spots so you could fill up there. That’s so stupid you might have trouble believing anyone acting like that, but they do!

If you’re spending money buying a new computer to run a program and it runs slow, would you go and buy another computer so you could run another program at the same time? Only if you were stupid. Would you upgrade the first computer so it could run faster? Maybe, maybe getting there but still not there. Would you find out why it was running slow and fix it (i.e. The program)? Yep, much closer. Getting there. What you should do is find out why it was running slow (which could be the program or it could be the hardware, or it could be both!) and fix that problem. If you had any sense you would.

There are too many people who run around like headless chickens shouting about getting their symptom cured, and ignoring the cause of the problem (so it could be fixed for them and everyone else). And those people make my job a bloody nightmare sometimes. Well, most of the time actually, but trying to be fair.

There are too many people who run around like headless chickens shouting about getting their symptom cured, and ignoring the cause of the problem (so it could be fixed for them and everyone else).

Tell me about it… You forgot to mention that additionally, you get the loveliest of attitudes towards you to go along with all that. 99% of the time, if you suggest to the moron that the cause might be a hole in the fuel tank, they snicker and debase you for thinking something so “stupid,” according to their chickenhead perceptions of the situation.

Then they will look down at you even more and think they are being really smart for carrying around not 2, but 5 cans of petrol. And they will tell themselves, “See, I knew this guy was stupid! Punctured tank! Doesn’t have a clue about what the problem is. This guy who is trying to sell me an extra truck to carry 50 cans of petrol where ever I go is on top of the money. Da man.”

Even worse, what really drives anyone insane is when the chickenheads have power, and their perceptions are decisive and under them are more chickenheads who all turn a deaf ear to you because they are all so clueless and you feel powerless, because you can’t even communicate how out of touch with reality they all are.